I swear Facebook is slowly turning into Lotus Notes. It's got the the little messenger panel on the right. It's got the clunky mail client, it's got the calendar and you can invite people to a meeting/party. You have to use it because everyone else uses it and everyone else uses it because it's been around for years.

It's not fun or simple to use any more and you have to be on your guard about what you share and who might see it.

It's not really surprising that teenagers aren't into it.

None. There are no changes. He is reviewing a transition to changes.

And remember, these are only executive changes, which means if the next president is worse, well then the changes can be undone with the stroke of a single pen by a single person (and they might even decide not to tell the public).

The permanent bulk collection of data continues for future use by any president or agency when the laws don't hinder them. It's a library they can peruse now or 50 years from now.

ps. someone needs to do a mashup of his first campaign speech to end abuses, arguing against this other person

Type I diabetic here. Assuming current tech stays where it is (not saying it will), this could easily tack 10 years on to my lifespan. For many who watch their diabetes less closely (something I cannot fault anyone for), this could add 20-30 years.

For anyone who does not know, type I diabetes is not something you can just follow a doctor's direction on and be ok. Even if you follow your doctor perfectly, there can still be serious complications, and type I diabetics with the best control are actually more likely to die from severe low blood sugars.

The reason for this is that the optimum blood glucose level is around 100. <70 and you start to be severely mentally impaired, making it difficult at times to seek treatment (finding and eating sugar, in a nutshell). On the flip side, if you are lax on insulin, your blood sugar might hover around 250 for months, and you will feel close to normal. Having a blood glucose this high on a long term basis will have long term effects that are what kill most diabetics in the long run. A low blood sugar, however, can be fatal within minutes to hours.

Either way, a continuous feedback mechanism would help tight control diabetics, and diabetics who do the minimum. Tight controllers could get faster feedback about when they are going into the serious danger zone without having to initiate any action (checking blood sugar), and lax diabetics would get a constant reminder of how they are letting there life slip away (which they normally would rarely see, since they hardly ever check their blood sugar anyway).

I have to say though, I am still a bit skeptical for a few reasons:

- One, I have been told about this sort of miracle technology ever since I was diagnosed 15 years ago.

- Two, the medical complex locks down their tech and extracts the maximum value out. There is not a single glucose device on the market that lets you extract the data out of your glucose monitor and crunch the data how you want. I have worked on hacking these devices to extract data and the legal verbiage around these activities has strongly discouraged me from releasing anything. Previous continuous glucose monitoring systems. These companies would prefer you rot in the dark, than to lose one bit of profit.

- Three, if one of these devices is not 100% perfect, it gets shot down and banned from the market. This is probably a combination of profit-motivated industry and caution-motivated government. A great example of this is a continuous glucose monitoring, non-invasive watch that came out ~ a decade ago. It was on the market for several years, before being banned. I, like just about every person in the thread I linked, would pay $10k+ for one of these, despite the reduced accuracy over traditional devices. Entrepreneurs in the health industry take note.

[1] [http://www.diabetesdaily.com/forum/testing-blood-sugar/61908...]

Here is some more general advice: assume acquisitions are not going to happen, and that this whole conversation is probably a waste of time for you. Even if you tell them everything they want to know, they either won't make an offer or will lowball you. And meanwhile it will have been a huge and uniquely damaging distraction.

This model of the world doesn't imply any specific strategy you should follow, but you'll find that adopting it will change the way you think about the situation. You'll stop bending over backwards (why bother, since nothing is going to happen?) which will in turn make them take on the burden of figuring out how to make the deal happen, which they'll do if they're serious.

Some Berkeley students developed a similar service called Ninja Courses[1]. This lets you browse through classes, order textbooks and also shows ratings. (Although all the ratings are submitted by Ninja Courses users, I believe.)

It can even automatically build a schedule for you by choosing lectures and sections that don't overlap, optimizing based on user preferences. For example: do you want more morning classes, more afternoon classes, more gaps, less gaps, some days off... This automates away a rather tedious part of choosing your schedule--something I haven't seen in other similar tools (although I haven't looked too closely).

Instead of shutting it down, the university used it to build an official Schedule Builder[2]. The official version doesn't have rankings, but exposes other interesting information--in particular, grade distributions.

Since then, Ninja Courses has expanded to a bunch of other UC campuses as well.

Just thought I'd share a nice success story to counterbalance most of the others :).

[1]: http://ninjacourses.com/

[2]: https://schedulebuilder.berkeley.edu/